


Camera Obscura

by djarum99



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-31
Updated: 2011-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/djarum99/pseuds/djarum99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack in the future being a good man, because there’s only one witness, and because he’s had decades to get used to the idea. OST has jossed this a bit with regard to the Fountain, but if anyone can find his way around a few minor supernatural obstacles, it’s Captain Jack Sparrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Camera Obscura

When she was just nineteen, a rich man’s porcelain daughter with wary eyes and clever fingers, Libby Mallory married a gambling man. Mama was dead, a victim of failing fortunes and Papa’s long, slow waltz with whiskey - eloping with Jimmy Parsons had seemed a grand idea at the time. A tall, blonde and handsome idea; Jimmy was a fine-made huckster with eyes blue as Virginia mornings, and a heart that was hers alone. Until it wasn’t. Fickle, Mama would have called him, clever but careless with the details. Dishonest as he was, Jimmy had proven a slapdash liar.

Maybe that was why they killed him.

He’d carried her down the courthouse steps in June of ‘34; she remembered the burn of his Buick’s leather, the shimmer of their asphalt horizon as Roanoke disappeared in the rearview mirror. They’d lived on the road, sometimes hardscrabble, sometimes like kings, Jimmy drifting from gentleman’s poker into back room conniving and the company of wolfish men. He disappeared for days at a time, returning flush with cash and raw gin bravado. In October, he’d bragged of robbery and flaunted a gun, clipping the last gaudy feathers of illusion.

Weary of hotel walls and denial, she bought herself a camera, a sweet little pawn shop Leica to paint the world in black and white. Her lens found elegance in poverty’s landscapes, poetry in breadlines, mysteries on gravel lanes, gifted her with distance, life defined and once removed. The Carolinas, Georgia, and December rolled past the Buick’s windows, and then the Florida police and a January midnight brought news that she was a widow. Someone shot Jimmy down in a Jacksonville alley, left him with a bullet in his chest and a marked deck in his shirt pocket. The coroner let her keep the cards.

Libby tucked grief in a cardboard suitcase and boarded the next train south - for the first time in her star-crossed life, she sailed the earth alone.

She’d ridden as far as the rails could take her, flying through palm fronds and dead Spaniard’s cities, across a blue Atlantic haze. Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad truly seemed the world’s eighth wonder, defying the water’s sullen grasp atop arches of concrete and steel. The window glass blur pressed cool at her cheek, Libby dreamed of wistful conquistadors, tall ships, the buried treasure promise of all the world might hold. Salt winds whipped her hair, and each red sun rose on deserts, mountains, cities she could not name...

When she woke, Libby studied her skin for portents, some sign of her new affliction. Not gambling fever, no, not Jimmy Parson’s clinging shade. This, this bone deep ache, was something bright and true - wanderlust, a sea change calling. She would bind herself to no one, no place or point in time. The world’s secrets were hers for the taking, immortality a mere trick of her camera’s light and shadow. _Her_ trick, and her salvation, this ability to freeze life in its tracks, observe it, know it, without soiling her hands or losing her heart.

Libby shed her husband’s name between St. Augustine and Old Key West, and laid in a stock of film. She spent the next few glorious months pursuing her newfound passion through an endless beachfront carnival and the cool of makeshift darkrooms. Jimmy’s bankroll thinned to nothing round about mid-May; it seemed she had inherited her father’s reckless head for finance.

A talent for hawking her photographs that would have made her mother blush for shame saw Libby through the next two months. In August, when the tourists heeded dire warnings to flee the wrath of marching thunderheads, she ran head-on into a choice between sleeping rough and selling the Leica.

Libby cast her lot with the rain.

Sea and sky conspired to prove her choice wrong, lashing the streets with nature’s fury, washing her clean of determination and the last cobweb remnants of pride. When her blind stumble brought her hard against cast-iron railings, she felt her way downwind to a gate, lurched inside. The rain let up for a few moment’s mercy and revealed a familiar brooding landscape. Key West’s cemetery - she’d come here to capture its angels on film in more optimistic times.

“Seems fitting,” Libby muttered, and sought shelter from the storm.

Stubbing her toes on granite, squinting up through a watershed curtain, she discovered a tribute to Egypt’s grandeur scaled down for humbler ghosts. Beneath this haven’s gabled roof, a chiseled notation reduced one man’s life to a narrow span of years. 1885 to 1929, and if John Wallace Mitchell had loved or lost or sinned, his visitors here were not to know. The crypt’s arched doorway swung beneath her hand - praise be to trusting groundskeepers - and the wind shoved her into darkness, a black peace that swallowed whispers...

_“The grave’s a fine and private place-”_

“And none, I think, do there embrace. Mind the rum, love.”

Glass chinked against sandy stone, a male voice muttered curses, and strong fingers grasped her ankle - Libby clutched the leather strap of her weapon of choice, and swung the Leica wide.

“Oi! Bloody harpy - was here _first_ -” Her opponent seized the other ankle, pulled, and she landed hard on her backside in an unseen cloud of dust. Kicking desperately, one foot connected and produced more fluent swearing - nautical, she thought, more offended than vicious - and a scrambling retreat to the crypt’s far corner.

“Truce. I’m unarmed, not in the habit of pummeling women, and you’re stirring up all manner of grit and ghosts.”

He sneezed, clothing rustled, and a match grated harsh against the pavers, flared bright. After, she would remember that he’d lit a candle; he must have had several concealed in his pockets, for they burned the whole night through. In the moment the first cast its glow on his features, awareness narrowed to her fingers’ itch for the Leica, the desire to map the planes of his face.

Candlelight is the great deceiver, and for a moment, his hair appeared woven in intricate patterns, shot through with silver and wild pagan color, his eyes inked in midnight, his smile laced with gold. The illusion faded as the flame rose steady, into a knotted gypsy bandanna, raindrops on dark tangles, the shadows of fatigue, a grin harboring only a stranger’s secrets. And still...

_“This man,” thought Libby Mallory, “might prove more risky than the storm.”_

He reached for his bottle, tipped it back, his gaze never leaving her face. “And who might you be, when you’re not threatening a man’s life?”

“I could hardly have killed you with a camera.” Gingerly, she hunkered down to rest on her heels, ready to spring for the door.

A snort, another long pull at the rum - “You’d be surprised, missy, what manner of thing can prove lethal.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, “not anymore,” remembering faithless blue eyes, the bloodstained ace of spades.

“Ah. Like that, is it? Here.” He waved the bottle under her nose, each finger wrapped around its neck boasting an abundance of grime and ship tar, and an impressive number of scars. A sailor, then. Libby accepted his offering without looking at why; it burned going down, but warmth returned to her fingers and toes.

“What’s his name, love? Him what proved near lethal and broke your maiden’s heart. For that matter, what’s yours?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You’re drinking my rum.” True enough; outside, the world screamed its endless dying chorus, and at least, in here, with him, she wouldn’t die alone. Another swig for courage, and she handed the bottle back.

“Libby Mallory. We were married, and he was no good, worse than that really, and he...”

“Left you?”

“Died.”

“Oh,” he said, looking like he’d opened the door to the tax man, but he shifted closer, passed the rum.

“My condolences. Have another.”

This time, she tastes molasses and wood smoke, and her eyes water, and the tears flow. Too many to hide, especially from a man with eyes like this one, dark as his liquor and sharp as a knife. The kind of man who pockets knowledge with sly purpose, and Libby cursed herself for a fool. His hands traced runes in the space between them, wards against unwelcome sorrow, and again the light played tricks, conjuring jewels on each long finger. When he proffered his wrinkled bandanna, releasing hair too long for a man, nothing remained of that magic but a disconcerting fine-boned grace.

“Swab the decks, then, when you’ve finished - you’re dripping. Bloody sin to water down Barbado’s finest, and the point of whiling away our time in this house of the dead is to avoid the deluge, not add to its tides.”

The faded cloth is none too clean and carries the scent of his sweat, but it’s the kind a man makes in the sun of what he loves, a revelation in salt and copper. She breathed him in and saw boards and canvas, sunset horizons and calico ports. Accepting his threadbare offering, Libby dried the only tears she’d ever shed for Jimmy Parsons.

“You haven’t told me your name,” she said, as the wind increased its tempo. A hurricane, there’s no longer doubt, come to sing of its birthright, come to claim nature’s due.

He tilted his head, eyes narrowed, as though her words posed a risky conundrum, bore options to be weighed.

“In this year of our lord, I reckon it’s safe to say I’m Jack Sparrow. _Captain_ Jack Sparrow.”

“Was there a year in which it wasn’t? Safe to say, that is.”

“A good many years. However, being the man that I am, I quite often said it anyway.”

“And what manner of man are you, Captain Jack Sparrow?” Libby wasn’t sure she wanted his answer, but the night looked to be a long one and death howled outside the door.

“My favorite subject, dear lady, and as it happens I’m my favorite protagonist. Allow me to tell you a fable or two, to pass the time and sweeten the dark.”

Mama had warned her about men like him, with thieving eyes, a lover’s mouth, and One Thing on their minds. Libby had already lost the One Thing, Mama had died young and joyless, and besides, this man had kept his calloused hands to himself. So far. Leaning back against the mausoleum wall, she let him inch the candle closer until they rested knee to knee.

“Once upon a time, the devilishly handsome son of a pirate lord fell madly in love with the sea...”

He painted the dusty walls with seaweed, ship’s rigging and fatal currents, mermaid’s tears and vengeful gods, but mostly he spoke of freedom and all the blood shed in its name. According to Jack, precious little of that blood had been his, though he had a tale for every visible scar and those hiding beneath his clothes.

“A kraken, surely you’ve heard of it, and this from a bullet I took in Port-au-Prince. Due to a lapse in judgment, I’ll admit, but fundamentally due to a woman, a woman fundamentally flawed, a woman who has plagued me all the days since I met her, and far too many of my nights.”

A woman who featured prominently in most of his ramblings, she noticed, pirate king and sometime lover, and married, to a dashing reaper of souls, no less. This appeared to present no obstacle, for reasons other than piratical nature, reasons Libby could not quite fathom, though she suspected they’d make her blush. A woman who’d saved him and fought at his side, betrayed him to death and reclaimed him, a woman he’d pulled from the sea. A dozen wild yarns and more that followed, of the deadly game of living and the glory of surviving each test. His satchel held another bottle, and the rum flowed until his face blurred and Libby found herself believing in dragons, mythic oceans off the edge of the map.

“What about you? Your story, beyond becoming a widowed bride and ending up here with me.”

“I’m...lost, I suppose. I’ve gone as far south as I can without drowning. My family’s disowned me, and I’ve run out of money. I guess that makes me a pirate. Like you.”

The words had sounded jaunty in her head, and plaintive in the air between them. “I’ll be fine. I’ve still got film for my camera.”

He leaned into the shadows, delved the satchel’s depths, and held out a fistful of paper. Green, even by candlelight. President’s faces, tens and twenties.

“Take it.” His voice is rough, and rum tells her what that means.

Libby hesitated, remembering hunger’s burn, the desperation in her boarding house mirror, all that lay behind her and the future’s empty doorways. The prospect made her bold - that, and hope, and cold fury. She’d been duped by the glimmer of a good man’s heart in the fabric of his stories - fool’s gold, and her proved a fool twice over. Setting her jaw, she reached out, took his money.

“We could...wait till morning,” she said, calculating distance to the door, the chance he might yet fall asleep. “Do you have a room somewhere?”

He swayed back on his heels, regained his balance with the ease of frequent practice - the man could hold his liquor, and Libby swallowed hard, missed the flicker of warmth in his eyes.

“Somewhere. Aye, if she’s weathered the gale - hardly seems likely, but Fate’s a ticklish wench. Wherever I sleep, fair Libby, I’ll be sleeping there alone, give or take a persistent phantom. You’re not that kind of girl, and I’m not that kind of man.”

Angry still, she risked hope’s price. “But you are. You are just that kind of man.”

“Very good, love - you do have an eye for truth. I am, have been, will be that kind of man, but only for those who demand such a bargain - not for you, and not tonight. Tomorrow, you take that magic box into the aftermath, and peddle your pictures to the first willing bidder. Or better yet, the highest.”

“You make it sound like...stealing. What I do with my camera.” The folded bills felt like salvation, curled dry in her skirt pocket, and perhaps their barter was for something more fragile than her honor, whatever she might have left.

He touched her then, cupped her cheek with rough cool fingers that carried the scent of brine.

“Stealing souls, some do say. Snatching spirits, holding them for posterity’s ransom. It all comes down to piracy, Libby Mallory, what we can do to stay alive. The trick is finding pleasure in it, holding tight, following that thing your heart wants most.”

“And stealing it?”

“If needs must. I dare you, Miss Mallory, to take what you can - no regrets.”

“Lord knows life’s taken enough from me,” she said, tasting rain as she breathed deep, the tomb’s lingering hint of death. “Dare accepted. But...how will you know if I keep my promise?”

“I’ll see them, won’t I - your pictures, in gazettes and magazines. They’ll tell me if you’ve spoken true.” Another grin, drowsy but knowing, hinting at sin, leaving Libby half-inclined to wish that Mama had been right.

Huddled close enough for warmth but not enough to threaten virtue, they waited out the last and worst of the hurricane’s violent rage. Scouring sand and the sound of unseen destruction finally yielded to eerie silence, the timid gray of morning. All four walls remained, but only by grace or random chance - the wind had sucked out mortar leaving chinks for the new dawn. In this light, her companion looked to be made of flesh and bone, though not the sort any woman would ever label commonplace. She watched him gather up bottles and his tear-stained bandanna, making ready to leave.

Her left hand was missing Jimmy Parson’s diamond ring.

Fair trade and fair enough, Libby figured. She’d known the stone was paste by the time they drove out of South Carolina. If she’d ever been the betting kind, Libby would have wagered that Jack Sparrow knew it, too.

“You never told me, Captain, what it is your heart wants most.“

“I’ve been everywhere twice - perhaps it’s time to make another round.”

“That’s not an answer.” After the night’s Scheherazade tales, Libby had no doubt that Jack Sparrow counted honesty as a talisman of long acquaintance - a bargaining trinket, a useful bauble for masquerade. Before they parted ways, she’d steal some measure of his truth; he had, after all, stolen far too much of hers.

“Your heart, Jack Sparrow. It longs for something. Someone? The woman in your stories.”

“Never.” He stood, brushed the crypt’s dust from the seat of his pants, started to reach for the door and then turned, met her eyes.

“She’s devious, treacherous, perfidious, altogether untrustworthy, and gone. Good riddance.”

“She sounds like your perfect match.”

“A lit match, in a room full of dry tinder.”

“I can’t imagine that stopping you. You’re a pirate.”

“I am. I am that, for all eternity. Godspeed, Libby Mallory.”

“We could walk out of here together,” she said, trying very hard not to sound wistful, and she’d be damned if she let him see scared.

“You and your camera would make most dangerous companions, as do I. There’s a small problem with the local constabulary, though I’d imagine they’re otherwise occupied, and besides, I sail best alone.”

“You’re lying, Jack Sparrow. You require an audience as well as a ship. Godspeed.”

He opened the door on a vista transformed. The storm had played dice with tombstones, statuary, and the bones of those long dead, jumbled roof beams and splintered palms like a spill of Chinese sticks. Jack stepped into sea foam that lapped at his boot tops, flashed a smile, and watery sunlight played the trick of his candles. Charmed silver again in his hair, on his fingers, the strap of his satchel a baldric, the flask at his belt a bristle of weaponry, the death-rattle wind a mournful shanty. Libby pressed the Leica’s shutter as he half-turned his head to wave, and then he vanished into memory to lead her patchwork crew of ghosts.

The hurricane, the one she always thought of as hers, took the Overseas Railway, Islamadora, and 408 human lives. Beyond the entrance of John Wallace Mitchell’s resting place lay the terrain of hell itself; Libby blessed her moldering benefactor, loaded the Leica, and set forth to record Armaggedon.

She kept a weather eye for her hurricane Captain, wandering the world to map its glories, humanity’s achievements and its follies. In London’s war-ravaged Docklands, she thought she caught a fleeting glimpse - Jack’s accent had been British, perhaps he’d finally ventured home. Once again in ‘46 on Île de Nantes, as Europe licked her wounds; once in Helsingborg as she strolled the harbor, and once in Sri Lanka. Libby’s switchblade aim was never quite fast enough, and in the darkroom she found only wily shadows, smudges of dark-eyed cunning, the blur of coattails rounding a corner.

Each time had been but a stone’s throw from the sea, and each time a woman strode laughing at his side.

Libby met her second husband in Jakarta, a journalist from California who nearly always spoke the truth. When he didn’t - most often in service of truth’s pursuit - she recognized a kindred heart. A man grasping at life two-fisted, and never letting go. Ben Swanson had eyes the color of Indian teak, and was loving father to their children; he seldom played at cards.

Jack Sparrow’s picture foxed and silvered, grew old except for his eyes, but come each September Libby raised a glass in memory of a voice like Martinique rum. There’s some would call a camera “thief,” a filcher of souls without faith or permission. Some see it more like borrowing a moment, bits and pieces, snips and shards. When she was newly twenty, a gambling man’s widow with a frozen heart, Libby Mallory stole spark from a pirate’s soul and burned bright all her days.


End file.
